You own a website and may even give advice there or share information of some kind. Whatever you are doing, if you are not using it to make money, then there is an untapped market waiting to be yours.

Website Traffic

This involves people visiting your website. What you want to count are your unique visitors, people who visit for the first time. Repeat visitors are great for sales but to gain interest, the more people who visit, the better.

In order for a business to make money it needs traffic. These people will do something for you on your website that will enhance their life and make money for you. There are a variety of ways to do it, but for any method you use to be cost effective, you will need traffic.

One way to gain traffic is to have a focus. This is your niche. This will determine which traffic comes your way and if they are going to buy whatever you decide to offer on your website.

Now, turn your attention to your content. That is why your traffic is there in the first place. If you haven’t already, optimize it for a wider readership. This involves targeting certain keywords in your articles, blog posts, headers and picture text. Not only will your content get ranked higher for those keywords, but your website also will. If you haven’t done so already, register your website with the major search engines.

Monetizing Your Website

Now that you have made a few tweaks to gain more focused traffic, you are ready to start making money with your website. Here are some ways you can get the job done.

* Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – This basically means that you are posting ads that people will click on. Whenever someone clicks on that ad, you get paid. Depending on who you are using for your service, there are other ways to do this besides just the click-through rate. One you can start with is Google AdSense.

* Banner Advertising – This is a way to get noticed. If you have a good fan base and have networked with others in your business niche, this can work for you. Sell advertising space at the top of your website. You can also sell on the sides, but keep in mind that the top half of your webpage is where people’s eyes tend to gravitate.

* Affiliate Marketing – You not only advertise for others and sponsor their products, but you also get access to lots of helpful tools so you can do just that. Earn commissions on your click rate as well as sale rate depending upon how the affiliate program is set up.

* Paid surveys – Companies will pay you to offer surveys to your visitors. Each time one of them takes the survey, you get paid.

There are many other ways to monetize your website but this is just the beginning. Once you have started, try other ways to make your expertise work for you.

If you are making a bit of money from AdSense but know you could be getting even higher CPMs (cost per thousand), then read this post carefully. You are about to learn a handful of powerful, proven tips and tactics for improving your AdSense CPMs.

Try Saying Sponsored Links

AdSense doesn’t allow you to tell users to click on advertising or to disguise advertising as non-advertising. However, AdSense does specifically allow you to place the text “Advertising” or “Sponsored Links” above an AdSense box. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, a normal-sized sentence, bolded that says “Our Sponsors:” can often increase conversions. Test it out in your market.

Match or Contrast

There are two ways main ways to get high conversions in AdSense. The first and most common is to make your AdSense format match as closely to your website as possible. The text color, font, font size, link color and AdSense borders should all match the layout of your site. When you do this, it is much more likely that someone will think the ads are part of your website or endorsed by your site and click on a link.

On the other hand, one less used but also successful tactic is to do just the opposite. Use contrasting colors or designs to deliberately make the ads stand out. Design the ad boxes in such a way that they literally pop out of the screen, drawing attention and possibly clicks.

Experiment with both methods to see how they work for you.

Always Split Test

Learn to use channels. Channels are somewhat confusing at first, but once you get the hang of them they are extremely powerful tracking tools. When combined with Google Website Optimizer, you can test a wide range of variables at the same time to figure out the best way to make the most money from your traffic. Test everything you can think of. Colors, placements, ad sizes, number of ad units – everything. You never know what will work until you try.

Placement Tips

In general, you will get a higher click-through rate by having your ads above the fold than below the fold. A classical location is the large square ad in the upper left corner of a post. Navigation bar ads are also another popular and successful option. Be sure to customize the settings so the navigation bar units look as similar to your actual navigation as possible. Finally, placement near images or other eye-catching elements on your website tends to work very well. Make sure not to misrepresent the ad as being related to the image, or you will violate the terms of service.

These are a handful of proven strategies, distilled from the experience of many marketers. You will rarely have a very high CPM when you are just getting started; however, over time, with consistent testing, you will find your CPMs rising higher and higher.

Google AdSense is a simple, no-nonsense way of turning web traffic into money. Instead of going through the hassle of selling advertising or creating your own product, with Google AdSense all you need to do is go through a ten minute set-up process and you will be earning money right away.

How Google AdSense Works

Google AdSense is what’s called a “contextual advertising” program. Basically, AdSense will read all the text around the ad, figure out what the website and webpage is about, and then serve up ads that are related to the category of your website. For example, let’s say you’re running a website that teaches people how to cook better. You don’t have a cooking store or product to sell, but you want to make some money from your website.

All you need to do is put up Google AdSense. Once AdSense is live, it will read the text on your website and figure out that it is about cooking. It will then serve up ads by advertisers targeting people who enjoy cooking. For example, you might have ads selling baking pans, utensils and cookbooks.

Every time someone clicks on your ad, you will get paid. The amount you are paid depends on how valuable the click is to the advertisers. For example, if you are running a candle-related website, you might make only $0.10 a click. On the other hand, if you are running a legal website, you might get paid as much as $3 a click.

How to Set Up Google AdSense

To get started, go to http://www.google.com/adsense/

You will need to register an account. In order to do so, you must first have a website up and running already so Google will know where you plan to put the ads. Then walk through the AdSense set-up process. At the end of the process, Google will generate a small snippet of code. Copy and paste this code into your HTML editor. Upload the file, and then wait about five minutes for it to process. Once AdSense has had a chance to read your website, it will generate the ads and you will soon be up and running. If you don’t edit your own website, just copy and paste the code and email it to your webmaster.

What Type of Websites Work Well with Google AdSense?

The best kinds of websites for AdSense tend to be content websites that get traffic primarily from search engines. It’s very rare that you will be able to make more money from AdSense than you are spending from another advertising source. For example, it doesn’t really make sense to try to advertise in a magazine for your website and try to make the money back with AdSense.

Because search engine traffic is free, you will almost always be profitable if you are driving traffic from search engines to AdSense. Content websites work best because you have increased trust already and people will tend to click on your recommendations and links. Also, AdSense tends to earn less than selling your own or other people’s products, so it doesn’t really make sense to use AdSense in conjunction with an ecommerce site. In short, AdSense works best with content sites that are ranked in search engines.

These are the basics of how to use Google’s innovative AdSense program. Setting it up takes less than ten minutes. If you’re already getting traffic, you can very soon be expecting a check from Google.

The quality of your website backlinks is one of the most important factors to ranking in search engines. Search engines look at links as endorsements. If one website links to you, that’s essentially a “vote” for your website.

If you get a “vote” from a high quality website such as Amazon.com or Apple.com, that’s counted as much more important than getting a link from just any website on the internet.

Without good backlinks, your chances of getting ranked for even semi-competitive keywords are almost zero. With great backlinks and great content, your chances of ranking for competitive keywords are much, much higher. Let’s take a look at the two most important factors to determining a link’s strength: relevance and authority.

Relevance

Getting a link from a website that is related to yours is counted much more highly than a link from a website that is not related to yours because search engines know that is how links are naturally supposed to work. Related businesses refer one another. People make recommendations to people with similar interests. If you suddenly get a bunch of unrelated links, search engines start to get suspicious. In other words, if you run a cooking website, it’s much better to get 50 links from other cooking websites than 200 links from clothing and violin websites.

Authoritative

In addition to relevance, Google also looks at the authority of a website when determining its link power. After all, if link count was all that mattered, anyone could just start 200 new websites and link them all to one site to get them ranked. That’s not how it works. Those websites need to have already built up credibility in Google’s eyes in order for the links to really count.

One way Google measures a site’s authority is through PageRank (PR). PR is a simple way of ranking how many websites have linked to that site. In turn, high PR sites can then link to another site and give them more of a boost than a low PR site.

PR isn’t all that matters, however. The website’s age, the amount of content, the time users stay on the site and how often they come back all come into play. In fact, over the last couple years, Google has significantly downplayed the role of PageRank in their algorithm because so many marketers have started trying to use PR to game the system.

Backlinks: The Bottom Line

The bottom line is this: try to get as many links as you can, from the best sites in your industry. You might not be able to start with the biggest sites, but start with websites that you admire and respect and work your way up to larger sites from there.

We are going to cover a range of different marketing ideas for small businesses that each cost less than $500 to implement and get publicity:

College Newspapers

Advertise in a local college newspaper or better yet, contact a journalist from your local college paper about a story in which they might be interested. College papers generally have cheaper advertising rates than regular newspapers, and they are easier to work with because they have editors whose email boxes are less bogged down. They also cater to a very specific audience; therefore, if your business plays well to college students, it is definitely worthwhile looking into college papers as a marketing avenue.

Host an Event

Host an event for your target market. It doesn’t have to be extravagant and you don’t even have to pick up the bill. One business consultant, for example, organized dinners between twenty influential investors and high-impact entrepreneurs. People who would never otherwise agree to dinner with him agreed to attend because they knew they would meet other high-caliber individuals. As a result, he built a powerful reputation and a client base with a list that drives his business forward.

Yelp, Meetup, Craigslist, Google Places

These are a few low-cost online services that you can use to market your business.

Yelp is an online review website where people review small businesses. They give it a rating from 1 to 5 and can write comments about the business. It is currently in several major cities in the U.S., including San Francisco and New York.

If you’re reviewed on Yelp, do everything you can to get as high a rating as you can. Yelp alone can drive a lot of traffic to your business.

Meetup is a website where people come together to find interest groups for various topics. It could include everything from salsa to yoga, to business, to rock climbing. If your business fits into a market that could benefit from Meetup, then you should definitely be on the website.

Craigslist is a free classifieds website where you can post ads for your business in the services section, as well as advertise events in the events section. It’s one of the most highly trafficked websites on the Internet.

Google Places is Google’s way of giving local businesses a leg up. If you get your small business listed on Google Places, your business will show up ahead of other websites targeting your search term that aren’t local. In other words, if you own a noodle shop in Boston and someone in Boston enters “Noodle Shop,” yours will come up first.

These are a few low-cost marketing ideas for small business owners. Each of these ideas can be implemented for less than $500. They are easy, affordable and efficient tactics that you can apply right now to see a boost in your business.